Life Sciences: Year In Review 2005

Botany

A major milestone in plant science reported in 2005 was the completion of the mapping of the complete sequence of the rice genome. This achievement was expected to pave the way for making critical improvements in rice, the staple food for more than one-half of the world’s population. The genome project took six years and involved 32 research groups from more than 10 countries. Although the function of many of the rice genes remained unknown, about 70% of them mirror those in Arabidopsis thaliana (thale cress), the only other completely sequenced plant genome. By teasing out the roles of the newly sequenced genes, researchers hoped to identify beneficial genes much more quickly and accurately and to develop strains of rice with the most advantageous combinations. They believed that the genetic modification and traditional plant breeding of rice would gain from a more complete understanding of the genome. Breeding of other major cereal crops also stood to benefit, because all of the major cereal crops—including rice—descended from a common, grasslike ancestor. “The rice genome is the Rosetta Stone of all the bigger grass genomes,” said Joachim Messing of Rutgers University, Piscataway, N.J., one of the research leaders. After analyzing the completed genome, the scientists found that rice has more genes than humans do—37,544 genes compared with the estimated 25,000 genes of the human genome.

Botanists were astonished by the remarkable discovery of plants whose reproduction seemed to shatter the laws of inheritance of all living things, as first described by Gregor Mendel in the mid-1800s. The plants were mutant specimens of Arabidopsis thaliana with closed, deformed flowers in which some flower parts were fused together. Each plant had two copies of a mutant, defective gene. When two such plants are cross-pollinated, the expectation under the Mendelian laws of inheritance is that all the progeny of the two plants will produce deformed flowers. Instead, the botanists observed that 10% of the progeny had normal flowers. Genetic analysis determined that the normal offspring had somehow replaced the defective gene in their DNA. Robert Pruitt, whose team at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., made the extraordinary discovery, believed that the normal offspring somehow acquired genetic information from an earlier generation than their parents’. The team had not determined the source of the genetic instructions for repairing the defective gene, but one possibility was RNA, molecules that are used by cells for the manufacture of proteins and that can also be passed directly from parent to offspring. What would trigger the plant to revert to healthier ancestral genes also remained a mystery, but it might be related to stress or to the severity of a mutation. “This means that inheritance can happen more flexibly than we thought in the past,” said Pruitt. “If the inheritance mechanism we found in the research plant Arabidopsis exists in animals, too, it’s possible that it will be an avenue for gene therapy to treat or cure diseases in both plants and animals.”

Advances continued to be made in 2005 in the genetic modification of plants. Chinese scientists led by Jingxue Wang of the Agri-Biotechnology Research Centre of Shanxi Province inserted two animal genes—one from a scorpion and one from a moth—into rape plants (the source of rapeseed oil, or canola) to make them poisonous to insects that feed on them. The researchers said that the use of two foreign genes instead of one would reduce the likelihood that insect pests would develop resistance to the genetically introduced toxins. Researchers at the University of Victoria, B.C., succeeded in inserting a modified frog gene into potato plants to give the plants resistance against a range of microbial diseases. The gene was taken from Phyllomedusa bicolor, a poisonous frog of South American rainforests, and it produces dermaseptin B1, a skin toxin that helps protect the frog against fungi and bacteria that thrive in the hot and humid conditions. The scientists found that the toxin also inhibits the growth of some of the fungi and bacteria that cause plant diseases.

Scientists at Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, Golm, Ger., reported a role for hemoglobins in plants. Hemoglobins are proteins best known for their function of carrying oxygen in human blood, but they are also found in high concentrations in the root nodules of legume plants. The nodules are home to symbiotic bacteria, called rhizobia, that take nitrogen from the air and turn it into ammonia, a nitrogen compound that plants can use readily. The nitrogen supplied by the bacteria is vital for plant growth in nitrogen-poor soils. (In return, the bacteria obtain food and shelter from the plant.) Thomas Ott and his team of scientists at the institute found that the plant hemoglobin carries away oxygen from the nodules and thereby helps protect nitrogenase, an oxygen-sensitive enzyme found in the nodules, from damage. Nitrogenase is needed by the bacteria for nitrogen fixation.

Scientists have long been astonished by the speed at which the Venus flytrap snaps shut—its two leaf lobes close together to entrap prey in a mere tenth of a second. The movement was believed to involve the pumping of water into or out of motor cells within the plant, but the release of water in these tissues is about 10 times too slow to explain the speed of the trap. A study by Yoël Forterre and colleagues at the University of Cambridge used high-speed video to record the snapping-shut motion of the Venus flytrap. Fluorescent reference dots painted onto the leaf lobes helped reveal how the lobes suddenly snapped and buckled. As the plant lies in wait for an insect, the leaf is curved outward. When an insect wanders into the trap and trips over a trigger hair on the leaf, the plant pumps water into the motor cells along the outside of the leaf. This action alters the curvature of the leaf until it flips rapidly from a convex to concave shape, similar to the way a bowed plastic lid will spring inward and outward. It is likely that other uncommon fast motions in plants—such as the explosive propulsion of seeds by the squirting cucumber—depend on similar mechanisms.

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